Mina's Pages

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

A-Z Challenge: Ichabod Crane

Today's character feature for A-Z Challenge (letter "I") is the legendary Ichabod Crane from Washington Irving’s dark classic, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. For being only a short story, it confounds me how timeless this character is. A couple years back, I reviewed this creepy classic (my review.) And surprise...I loved it. The main reason was not just for the Headless Horseman, but for the Ichabod. Reading this character's description alone, feels like he jumps right off the page. Here's a snidbit:

"He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield."

I love this. It's so masterfully descriptive, it's inspiring. Don't you think? And as the story unfolds, his character unravels even more deliciously so. You gotta laugh when you see Hollywood's take on Ichabod i.e. Johnny Depp in the Sleepy Hollow--which by all accounts was awesome. Yet with all Depp's entertaining efforts of the schoolmaster's geeky portrayal, he wasn't truly Ichabod. Not even close.

Okay, so I have a cool story (at least I think it is LOL)... while my hubby and I were watching Sleepy Hollow, we came to the part where Ichabod was doing an autopsy on a pregnant woman. A few seconds later, my water broke with our second child. I didn't finish watching that movie until years later. :D